Rob Howard published an article on MasterWP, that we should deprecate WordPress Multisite. This led to many responses on social media. And based on the reaction saying we can see that reports about WordPress’ Multisite death are greatly exaggerated.
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What is WordPress Multisite
Some of you may don’t even know what WordPress Multisite is and never even used it. In short – it’s a type of WordPress installation that allows us to create and manage a network of websites from one dashboard.
It’s very useful if you have a lot of websites as it makes the update process much easier. It also lets us enable network-wide plugins.
What are WordPress Multisite main issues
Rob points few of them:
- clunky way of assigning roles to different sites
- the fact that we still have to login to each page separately
- sharing themes and plugins is not longer necessary because of git and different deployment methods
The problem is that many big players responded to this. Let me just cite a few tweets from companies and people responsible for some really big networks
And I agree with everyone who is pro-Multisite. Overall WordPress Multisite is just a tool and it’s quite a specific one. It’s not something most people will use on daily basis, but there are some rare situations (in the scale of all the WordPress installations) when Multisite is just a perfect tool for the job.
I also had my share of MS jobs. Was it a perfect experience? Far from it. But it was always the best way to go. It helped me solve a lot of problems thanks to the fact it was generally one WordPress.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
What we should do?
But Rob has some valid points. I agree that WP MS experience could be better. But the way to solve is a bit different than deprecation. Heck, if we would deprecate each part of WordPress because of far-from-perfect experience WordPress would be ripped from most of its functionality.
We should just proceed the typical way:
- Create tickets on Trac that points the bugs and errors
- Fix those tickets or fund developers to do so
Of course – it’s not easy. Sometimes fixing some takes years, but as we can see WordPress Multisite is used by some really big companies – it should be in their interest to make WP MS better.
Author: Maciek Palmowski
I’m one of the co-creators of WP Owls and I’m responsible here for finding interesting links, guest editors and for the most of the rambling on Twitter.
